write a critical essay drawing on one or more approaches to film and television history.

Early Cinema

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EARLY CINEMA

Cinema represents a unique institution for examining technological development . Unlike many other modern technologies , cinema achieved its standardized form in an extraordinarily brief period of time . The Hollywood classical style was not established in cinema 's first 20 years , but continues as the dominant film style even today . Moreover cinema has routinely assimilated competing technologies like sound or digital images with almost no long-term change to its formal style

An understanding of the historical moment of cinema is needed

for cinematic technologies . As mentioned earlier , cinema was standardized in an astonishingly brief time period unlike many modern media technologies . Take , for example , that foundation for narrative cinema was technically and stylistically established by 1908 and it was only in 1895 that cinema is invented . Moreover , cinema has successfully assimilated a nearly endless stream of mechanical , optical , chemical and electronic technologies - often in short time periods and with only temporary disruptions to film style . A better historical understanding of the evolution of cinema may prove informative for other media technologies since cinema paved the way for later technologies such as television , video , computer interfaces , and video games with a formal visual style

According to film Noll Burch , early cinema is polycentric Specifically , Burch refers to the earliest films ' uncentered , panoramic frames , but polycentrism ' also proves an apt metaphor for early cinema in general . Far from a single definable genre , early cinema represents several geographically diverse and competing systems simultaneously experimenting with film form . Of course , this diversity makes defining (however generally ) early cinema challenging . A stylistic innovation - a dissolve , for instance - might represent very different trends depending on the specific film 's nationality and year (or even month ) of production . To complicate matters further , only a small percentage of early cinema survives today . Thus , it is more imperative to study film history in a non-linear fashion . Cinema proceeds in a direction neither exclusively teleological nor evolutionary . Instead , progress ' in one direction accompanies regression in another . Some technical and formal traits appear early in film history only to disappear and then return years or even decades later . To show this non-linear history , this focuses on early cinema 's development . However , rather than exhaustively document cinema 's invention which is a nearly impossible task , this stresses early cinema 's extraordinary diversity

Eadweard Muybridge , a respected British still photographer working in the United States , first experimented with serial photography in Palo Alto , California during 1871 . Like his contemporary , Etienne-Jules Marey , Muybridge had as his goal the analysis of individual locomotion Yet , the two men took significantly different approaches . While Marey concentrated on a single camera /multiple exposure device , Muybridge used a series of cameras to capture distinct , incremental photographs of a moving subject . His experiment arose from a bet made by his patron railroad magnate Leland Stanford , who wagered that all four horse 's feet leave the ground during its gait . Stanford commissioned Muybridge to prove this assumption . Along with Marey , Muybridge established a...